Risking the Questions

Elizabeth Johnson and Sr. Joan Chittister explain their ideas about God and the understanding that how a believer sees others and the whole of creation depends on how that person imagines God. Johnson explains that the Western Christian world for too long has focused on humans as sacred apart from the rest of creation. Our view of creation would change dramatically, she says, if we had a view of n...

Sr. Joan and Johnson discuss creation’s relationship to the Creator. Johnson sees Jesus as exemplifying that relationship. She draws on a scene in Mark’s gospel where Jesus is placed “with the wild animals.” The setting, she said, “embodied the Jewish hope for redemption that included all of creation.” Jesus’ coming of age in a rural town, she says, made him familiar with not only the animals but...

Elizabeth Johnson discusses the title and the basis for the accompanying meditations. She then details why Christianity has to rediscover God’s relationship with the earth, highlighting God’s care for all creatures. Throughout the episode, she speaks of “deep incarnation,” or God’s active engagement with all of creation, not just with humans, a dimension that takes on heightened significance in th...

Being a woman in the Catholic Church, a nun who insists on asking difficult questions and holding those in power to account for what they say and do can make for a sometimes lonely and difficult life. So, she has been asked more than a few times, “Why do you stay?” There are a lot of components to that answer and they were gathered years ago into an essay for the magazine, Lutheran Women Today. In...

As a woman religious and spiritual leader of global significance, Sr. Joan Chittister came into contact with members of other faith traditions around the world. One of the results was the book, Welcome to the Wisdom of the World (Eerdmans, 2010), which understands those traditions in contemporary circumstances. In this episode Joan describes how she came to understand the significance of other tra...

As a young sister teaching school, Joan Chittister one evening came across the small book, Women and the Church, by Sr. A.M. McGrath, a Dominican sister and a PhD historian and chair at the time of the history department at Rosary College. The book, published in 1976, is a piercing march through the church’s historical attitudes about women, a mixture of deep history and polemic. Chittister read i...

It wasn’t until 2011, during interviews that would ultimately become a foundation for the biography Joan Chittister: Her Journey from Certainty to Faith (Orbis 2015) that Joan spoke openly to anyone about a childhood that had been marked by fear of the violence her mother faced constantly at the hands of an alcoholic stepfather. She would carry the memories and effects of that trauma for the rest...

At the heart of the work, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope (Eerdmans, 2005) is a searing personal tale of a young Sr. Joan Chittister. Having been accepted to one of the country’s most prestigious writing programs, the permission to attend was inexplicably and, without warning, withdrawn by her superior at the last moment. It was a cruel act without explanation and sent Chittister into a d...

This is a conversation, based on a talk developed and refined over years, in which Sr. Joan Chittister describes how, in a life dedicated to serving God, neither God nor her idea of God remained static. In the talk, she notes that belief in God is not an exceptional matter.“Every people on earth, in fact. Has come to the juncture where only God is an answer to questions for which there are no answ...

One example of the change occurring in religious life is Sr. Valerie Luckey. She is 36 years old, entered the Erie Benedictines in 2016 after completing a degree at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and a stint as a school teacher. She made her final vows in 2021. She joins the conversation today with Sr. Joan Chittister. In some ways, the differences between them and their path to religious...

Gone are the convents filled with sisters draped in long, dark dresses called “habits,” clothing from much earlier centuries often topped with starched wimples of various designs that squeezed the wearer’s face and allowed a view of only chin to just above the eyebrows. Gone are the Catholic elementary schools filled with children of the baby boom taught almost exclusively by the sisters, who work...

In episode two, Chittister and Roberts explore the impact of the Second Vatican Council on religious orders, focusing particularly on the council's direction to religious orders "to go back to their founder, decide what you were founded for, what you were doing now and what was needed now." The result was a deep examination of purpose, of history and how the wisdom and practice of centuries applie...

Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister has a well-earned reputation as one who dares to ask big, bold questions — of civil and church authorities, of long-held assumptions about women and their place in the church and the wider world, about religious life, about the church itself. This first episode in her new podcast, "Risking the Questions," fittingly explores her book Called to Question: A Spiritual M...